TNAG-2417-FCO40-3519-Hong-Kong-Her-Majesty-s-Overseas-Civil-Service-(HMOCS)-poli-1992 — Page 151

17 January 1992

Mrs S Brown

AE1 Division

HM Treasury

Parliament Street

LONDON

Dear Sandra,

CONFIDENTIAL

HKA 233/1

2 2 JAN 1992

Foreign & Commonwealth

Office

File

ic

Attachments

With

London SWIA 2AH

/

HONG KONG HHOCS

1.

Kevin Woodfield passed on some amendments late on 16 January to the slimmed-down version of our paper which we sent you on 15 January. In the interests of getting a version of the paper to the Governor before he left for Europe, we incorporated all these changes into the paper. now enclose a clean copy of the version sent to the Governor, together with a side-lined copy showing the amendments.

2.

Having now had a chance to look at your amendments, I wanted to make clear that we would not be able to accept a number of them. I hope that you will make clear in submitting the paper that it is not in this form agreed between us; we will do the same.

I

3. That said, I think we are engaged in a useful exercise of narrowing down the differences. In that spirit, I thought it might be helpful if I spelt out our views on the amendments which give us difficulties:

We

the effect of a number of your amendments is to play down the risk of a seriously adverse reaction among HMOCS officers to a decision not to proceed with a safeguard agreement. The Governor is in the best place to assess those risks, and our paper was based on his assessment. quite accept that it is for Ministers to decide whether they want to run those risks and our paper was neutral on that. But we would not want the officials' paper to give Ministers the impression that the risks are less than is in fact the case;

-

on the compensation scheme (para 8, former para 7) we stick to our guns that it is more accurate to say that this "would go some way to meeting our commitment" rather than that it "would meet our commitment". The question could be tested by judicial review after a scheme was announced, and we cannot make a categorical statement that the Courts would not rule that it failed to meet the reasonable expectations of HMOCS officers. On the subject of judicial review we perhaps also need to spell out more clearly in the paper that

NC1ABM

CONFIDENTIAL